David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

the cancer was gone. Max Wintrobe heard what Freireich was up to and tried to stop him. Freireich was torturing the patients, Wintrobe said. He was not wrong. His was the empathetic response. But it is also the response that would never have led to a cure.
    “We used to do bone marrows by grabbing their legs like this,” Freireich told me. He held one of his giant hands out, as if wrapped around a child’s tiny femur. “We’d stick the needle in without anesthesia. Why no anesthesia? Because they’d scream just as much when you gave them an anesthesia shot. It’s an eighteen- or nineteen-gauge needle straight into the shinbone, right below the knee. The kids are hysterical. The parents and nurses hold the kid down. We did that for every cycle. We needed to know if their bone marrow had recovered.”
    When he said the words “grabbing their legs like this,” an involuntary grimace passed across Freireich’s face, as if for a moment he could feel what an eighteen-gauge needle straight into the shinbone of a small child felt like, and as if the feeling of that pain would give him pause. But then, as quickly as it appeared, it was gone.

1.
    The most famous photograph in the history of the American civil rights movement was taken on May 3, 1963, by Bill Hudson, a photographer for the Associated Press. Hudson was in Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King Jr.’s activists had taken on the city’s racist public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. The photo was of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog. Even to this day, it has not lost its power to shock.

    Hudson gave his roll of film from that day to his editor, Jim Laxon. Laxon looked through Hudson’s photos until he came to the boy leaning into the dog. He was, he said later, riveted by the “saintly calm of the young [man] in the snarling jaws of the German shepherd.” He hadn’t felt that way about a photograph since he published a Pulitzer Prize–winning photo seventeen years before of a woman jumping from an upper-story window in a hotel fire in Atlanta.
    Laxon took the picture and sent it out over the wires. The next day, the New York Times published it above the fold across three columns on the front page of its Saturday paper, as did virtually every major paper in the country. President Kennedy saw the photograph and was appalled. The secretary of state, Dean Rusk, worried that it would “embarrass our friends abroad and make our enemies joyful.” The photo was discussed on the floor of Congress and in countless living rooms and classrooms. For a time, it seemed like Americans could talk of little else. It was an image, as one journalist put it, that would “burn forever…the thin, well-dressed boy seeming to be leaning into the dog, his arms limp at his side, calmly staring straight ahead as though to say—‘Take me, here I am.’” For years, Martin Luther King and his army of civil rights activists had been fighting the thicket of racist laws and policies that blanketed the American South—the rules that made it hard or impossible for blacks to get jobs, vote, get a proper education, or even to use the same water fountain as a white person. Suddenly, the tide turned. A year later, the U.S. Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of the United States. The Civil Rights Act, it has often been said, was “written in Birmingham.”

2.
    In 1963, when Martin Luther King came to Birmingham, his movement was in crisis. He had just spent nine months directing protests against segregation in Albany, Georgia, two hundred miles to the south, and he had limped away from Albany without winning any significant concessions. The biggest victory the civil rights movement had won to that point had been the Supreme Court’s decision in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, declaring segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional. But almost a decade had passed and the public schools of the Deep South were still as racially divided as ever. In the 1940s and early 1950s, most Southern states had been governed by relatively moderate politicians who were at least willing to acknowledge the dignity of black people. Alabama had a governor in those years named “Big Jim” Folsom, who was fond of saying “all men are just alike.” By the early sixties, all the moderates were gone. The statehouses were in the control of hard-line